Search Filters Trim Deposit Bonus Claims 17% at Step 3
Operators who added a single qualifying-question screen between the bonus landing page and the deposit form cut completed first-deposit claims by 17% at that step, according to a six-month test run across 11 US-facing brands. The filter — a short form asking players to confirm they had read the wagering terms and to select a game category — was intended to reduce bonus abuse and support tickets. It did that. It also removed roughly one in six depositors who had already entered payment details.
The data comes from a set of A/B tests run between April and October 2024 by a payments and compliance vendor working with licensed operators in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and West Virginia. The vendor shared aggregate results with me on condition that individual brands not be named; the operators are a mix of casino-only apps and combined casino-sportsbook products, with monthly first-time depositor (FTD) volumes between 4,200 and 61,000. None of the tests involved a change to the bonus itself. The only variable was the step-3 screen.
That distinction matters, because the 17% figure is easy to misread. It is not a 17% drop in bonus claims overall. It is a 17% drop in the share of users who reached step 3 — the point where the deposit amount is already selected and the payment method is often pre-filled — and then completed the claim. Users who abandoned at step 1 or step 2 are not in the denominator. The vendor's own write-up put the funnel-completion effect at a 9.4% reduction in total FTDs for the test cohort, with the remainder recovered over the following 30 days at a rate of roughly 38%.
What the step-3 screen actually asked
The filter was deliberately short. Three questions, all required, no free-text fields:
- "Do you understand that this bonus carries a 35x wagering requirement on bonus funds only, and that games contribute at different rates?"
- "Which of these do you plan to play first?" (Slots, table games, live dealer, sportsbook)
- "Are you currently receiving a bonus or promotion from another operator?" (Yes / No / Prefer not to say)
Question 3 is the one operators cared about most, and it is also the one most likely to be doing the work in the 17% number. The vendor's segmentation showed that users answering "Yes" to question 3 abandoned at step 3 at more than double the baseline rate — 31.6% versus 14.9% in the control group. That is a self-selecting population: players who already have an active bonus elsewhere are, on average, less likely to clear a second one, and more likely to generate support tickets about "why can't I withdraw."
The other two questions produced smaller but measurable effects. Users who selected "live dealer" as their first game abandoned at 19.2%, compared with 13.8% for slots and 11.4% for sportsbook. That tracks with the math: live dealer tables typically contribute 10% or less toward wagering, so a player who intends to play live dealer on a 35x bonus is looking at an effective requirement many times higher than the headline number. Some of them figure that out on the screen. Some of them figure it out three days later, in a chat window.
Question 1, the comprehension check, had almost no effect on abandonment — 15.1% versus 14.9% in control. Nearly everyone clicked "yes." The vendor's read is that the question functions as a disclosure, not a filter. That is consistent with years of research on terms-and-conditions screens: people scroll, people click, people do not read. If you want a comprehension check to actually filter, you have to make it cost something, and a yes/no box does not.
The design choices that moved the number
Two implementation details swung the result by several points in either direction.
The first was placement. When the screen appeared after the payment method was selected but before the deposit was confirmed, abandonment was highest — 17% at step 3 in the pooled sample. When the same three questions appeared before the deposit amount was chosen, abandonment dropped to 11.3%, but so did the abuse-reduction benefit: the vendor measured a 41% smaller reduction in multi-bonus users. In other words, the filter works best when it is placed where it is most annoying. That is not a coincidence; it is the mechanism.
The second was the "Prefer not to say" option on question 3. In the first two months of testing, one operator used a binary yes/no. Abandonment at step 3 hit 21.4%, and the operator's compliance team flagged the question as potentially discouraging legitimate players who had a small residual bonus elsewhere. Adding "Prefer not to say" brought abandonment down to 17.8% for that brand and, notably, did not increase the share of multi-bonus users who completed. The users who would have lied on a binary question mostly told the truth when given a third option. That is a small but real finding: forced-choice questions on sensitive topics produce worse data and worse funnel numbers than three-option questions, and the cost of the third option is close to zero.
Why 17% is smaller than it sounds, and larger than it looks
The headline number is a step-3 conversion delta. The number that shows up in an operator's P&L is different, and it is smaller.
Start with a typical funnel. For the brands in this test, the median pre-test funnel looked like this: 100 users land on the bonus page, 62 start the deposit flow, 48 reach step 3, and 41 complete the first deposit and claim the bonus. That is a 41% landing-to-FTD rate, which is high by industry standards but plausible for paid search traffic on branded bonus terms.
Add the step-3 filter at 17% abandonment. Now 48 users reach step 3, and 39.8 complete — call it 40. The landing-to-FTD rate drops from 41% to 40%, a 2.4% relative decline. That is the number a marketing director sees in a weekly report, and it is why some operators kill these tests early.
But the vendor's 30-day data tells a different story. Of the 8.2 users lost at step 3 per 100 landing-page visitors, about 3.1 returned and completed a deposit within 30 days without the bonus, or with a smaller bonus. Another 1.4 deposited but did not claim any bonus. The remaining 3.7 never came back. So the true 30-day FTD loss is closer to 3.7 per 100 landers, or a 9% relative decline — which matches the 9.4% figure the vendor reported for total FTDs.
Against that, the operator avoids paying bonus value on 8.2 users, of whom some fraction would have abused or churned. The vendor's model, which I would treat as directional rather than precise, put the net bonus-cost saving at $4.10 to $6.80 per lost FTD, depending on the brand's average bonus size and the share of users who would have cleared. For a mid-size operator doing 20,000 FTDs a month, that is somewhere between $82,000 and $136,000 a month in avoided bonus liability — offset by the lifetime value of the 3.7 users per 100 who never came back.
Whether that trade is good depends entirely on what you think a lost FTD is worth. If your LTV-to-CAC ratio on bonus-claiming FTDs is 1.4, the filter is close to neutral. If it is 3.0, you just lit money on fire. The vendor did not share LTV data, and the operators I spoke with would not either. That is the hole in the analysis, and it is a big one.
The support-ticket effect is real and it is not in the 17%
Every operator in the test reported a decline in bonus-related support contacts. The pooled figure was a 23% reduction in tickets tagged "bonus terms" or "wagering" in the 60 days after the filter went live, compared with the 60 days before. One operator, a casino-only app in Michigan, reported a 34% drop.
That matters because bonus support tickets are expensive in a way that is easy to underestimate. They are not just labor cost. They are often the first step in a complaint that ends up with a state regulator, and in the four states in this test, regulators do read those complaints. A ticket that never gets opened is a ticket that never becomes a $12,000 legal review.
The vendor did not attempt to monetize the ticket reduction, which is probably wise. The number is real but it is a cost avoidance, not revenue, and cost avoidances have a way of getting double-counted in these decks.
What the test does not tell you
Three limitations are worth stating plainly, because the 17% number will get quoted without them.
It is not a random sample of US operators. The 11 brands skew toward operators with existing compliance staff and a willingness to run tests on the deposit flow. Smaller operators, and operators whose bonus terms are simpler than 35x, may see different results. A brand with a 15x requirement and a 100% slots contribution is filtering a much smaller population of confused users.
The 35x figure is doing a lot of work. The test used a bonus with a 35x wagering requirement on bonus funds only, which is roughly middle-of-the-pack for US online casino bonuses in 2024 but well above what most sportsbook promos carry. A sportsbook-first operator running a $200 risk-free bet would likely see a much smaller step-3 effect, because the terms are simpler and the user's mental model of "I bet, I get paid" is closer to the truth. One operator in the test ran a parallel sportsbook funnel with a similar screen and saw only a 6.2% step-3 abandonment increase. Same screen, different product, one-third the effect.
The 30-day recovery figure is modeled, not observed. The vendor tracked returning users for 30 days, but attribution on a return visit is messy. A user who comes back via a different device, a different email, or an affiliate link may not be matched. The 38% recovery rate is probably a floor, which means the 9.4% total FTD reduction is probably a ceiling. If recovery is actually 50%, the total FTD hit is closer to 7%.
The compliance angle nobody is advertising
Here is the part that gets left out of the vendor's case study. In three of the four states where these tests ran, the applicable regulations already require operators to present bonus terms "clearly and conspicuously" before a deposit is made. New Jersey's Division of Gaming Enforcement has been explicit about this in advisory bulletins; Michigan's Gaming Control Board has similar language. The step-3 screen is, at minimum, a defensible way to demonstrate compliance. At best, it is a genuine consumer-protection measure that happens to reduce abuse.
That framing is not cynical. It is how the operators who kept the screen after the test described it to me. The ones who killed it described it as a conversion tax. Both descriptions are accurate. The difference is what you think the deposit flow is for.
The open question: who pays for the filter?
The 17% number will circulate as a marketing stat — vendors will put it on slides, and operators will use it to justify either keeping or cutting the screen, depending on which way their quarterly numbers are leaning. The more useful question is not whether the filter works. It clearly does, at the margin, on the specific population of users who reach step 3 with an active bonus elsewhere and an intention to play live dealer.
The useful question is who absorbs the cost. If the operator absorbs it, the filter survives only as long as the compliance team outranks the growth team. If the affiliate absorbs it — through lower conversion on the traffic they send — the filter survives and the affiliate economics quietly reset, which is already happening on bonus-comparison sites that now pre-qualify users before the click. And if the player absorbs it, the filter is doing exactly what it was designed to do, which is to make a small number of people think for eleven seconds before they deposit.
Eleven seconds is roughly how long the median user spent on the screen, according to the vendor's session data. That is not much. It is also, on the evidence, enough to move one in six of them off the deposit button — and enough to make the next operator who runs this test wonder whether the 17% is a cost or a correction.